Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “Nothing is pure in this world.” There are those who revel in that perception and take it as a license. I am not among them. But I did get a lot from the Rolling Stones when they were new, and I think what I got was pretty much the same as what Saturday-night dancers to Robert Johnson got on the plantations and in the roadhouses in the thirties: some raw emotion, strong pride, sharp attitude, ideas about what clothes would attract sexy women, and a kind of dance music that physically felt good and made you want to jump around and take off. The Rolling Stones had that effect on me, because they were a real good blues band.

  1. In a dream I had.

  2. Exhibit A being the famous 1966 Royal Albert Hall live date, where, incidentally, of fourteen original compositions Dylan performs, three happen to be pure blues constructions: “She Belongs to Me,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.”

  3. Palmer didn’t really say that thing about horn players pressing their necks between frying pans. He did say they’d use handfuls of kazoos as mutes. And then regarding blues “history,” there’s also a lot to the point made by Robert Gordon in It Came From Memphis, paraphrasing his friend Jim Dickinson, “The best songs don’t get recorded, the best recordings don’t get released, and the best releases don’t get played.”

  PIANO BLUES AND BEYOND

  Directed by Clint Eastwood

  Fats Domino came to the plains of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming when we were making Any Which Way You Can. He started playing one of his songs, “I Want to Walk You Home” on a grand piano. All of a sudden everyone stopped and looked over the side of the hill and there were about ten elk. They were all standing there with their heads tilted to where the sounds were coming from—and as soon as Fats stopped playing, they left. They were fascinated. Everybody likes the blues.

  I think music plays a very important part in a movie by punctuating the drama, and it is important that it enhances the drama and not intrudes upon it. There are moments when silence in a film can play a very important part as well. To me the complications of the theme are dictated according to what the story calls for. I’ve done a lot of movies where I have been lucky enough to incorporate jazz and the blues—two of America’s great art forms.

  When I was a kid music was a constant. After Fats Waller died, my mother brought home a whole collection of his records, saying that they would be the last of his music to be available. I learned to play the piano by listening to his records and trying to imitate other jazz and blues artists of that era. I taught myself to play a little stride piano and a three-chord eight-beat thing. I became interested in boogie-woogie, jazz, and bebop. I was telling stories on the piano long before I ever directed a movie. In my movies, I like the image of the piano player: The piano player sits down, plays, tells his story, and then gets up and leaves, letting the music speak for itself.

  My love for the blues continued while growing up in Oakland, California. On the radio and on records, I heard great piano players, like Art Tatum, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and Erroll Garner, as well as the boogie-woogie piano players, such as Clarence “Pine Top” Smith, Albert Ammons,

  Jay McShann (left) and Pinetop Perkins, 2003

  Pete Johnson, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Jay McShann. There was a musical scene that allowed all kinds of styles to flourish, including gospel, which is where I think much of the blues started in the churches of the South.

  A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being on a program with Jay McShann at Carnegie Hall. I was playing “After Hours” by Avery Parrish on the piano, and I hadn’t played this song in many years. The deal was Jay was going to come in and take over. I had said, “I don’t know if I know all of it … be sure and make certain McShann comes in and takes over.” So, there I am playing on stage at Carnegie Hall and all of a sudden I am coming to the end of my repertoire and Jay wasn’t there. Afterward, Jay said, “Well, you seem to be doing OK, I just thought I’d let you go.”

  Recently I asked Jay McShann, “Would you describe yourself as happy?” He told me, “Pretty much, but sometimes you can’t see from lookin’.” In doing the movie about piano blues I want the camera to look but not get in the way of seeing.

  —Clint Eastwood

  OUR LADIES OF THE KEYS: BLUES AND GONE

  BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  In 1975 Marcia Ball gave birth to her own blues.

  She was a Louisiana gal, born in 1949 in Orange, Texas, right on the state line, but raised in Vinton, Louisiana, close to the border and a four-hour drive from New Orleans. In the mid-1970s, she was married, fooling around with a band or two, and living in Austin, Texas. She was pregnant and realized she had to make some big decisions. Was she gonna be in the blues or out of it? Was she gonna lead a band or be led by one? She had been involved in music since she was a kid; all the female members of her family—her mother, her grandmother, her aunt, her cousins—played piano. She had worked with other musicians, and she had worked alone. She understood now, by experience and by sweat, that if she was going to have a baby—and she was planning on it—she would have to call the shots in her musical life if it was going to work; otherwise, she wasn’t going to be able to work at all. So she started her band, the Marcia Ball Band, and she’s been running it ever since. She kept right on playing almost until she gave birth to her son, Luke; and a few days after she had him, she was back onstage, playing locally. She was a child of the blues now, and nothing was gonna stop her. Maybe she was never going to make much money doing what she was doing, maybe she was never going to make it out of Austin, but that’s love. That’s life. That’s the blues.

  Women—all those unrelated Smith gals: Bessie, Mamie, Trixie, and Clara, as well as Ma Rainey,

  Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, and others—gave birth to the blues. In the early part of the twentieth century, women were the first to record the blues (Mamie Smith’s 1920 rendition of “Crazy Blues” was the first blues record ever made), and they were the first to make it really sell. In the early part of the twenty-first century, it might be argued that women are the driving force behind the rebirth of the blues. While female vocalists such as Bessie Smith helped launch the form nearly a century ago, today the genre is being championed by a generation or two of female instrumentalists, many of them keyboard players, some of them guitarists, most of them singer/songwriters. And while a fair number of these female players are perhaps more pop-y than rootsy, the blues—the same blues that Ma had, that Bessie had, that Billie had—informs their music or colors it in a significant way.

  Female instrumentalists—women with their fingers flickering across keys, with their hands on guitars, with their arms raised, leading big bands—have been a key part of the development of the blues, jazz, and rock, though their contributions are often undercelebrated. Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis Armstrong’s second wife, was a brilliant pianist and singer, and after convincing the young Louis to quit King Oliver’s band and strike out on his own, she played and sang on some of his seminal Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Galveston, Texas-born blues-and-boogie pianist Camille Howard, with her strong, sexy, two-fisted keyboard attack, helped, along with other performers, to engineer the

  Katie Webster

  cultural and musical shift between jump blues and rock & roll. Trinidad-born performer Hazel Scott (at one time the wife of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.) was the first black woman in the United States to have her own TV show, appeared in several movies, and perfected a sophisticated blend of blues, jazz, and classical music. The list of accomplished female piano heroes in blues and jazz—such a rundown would have to include the trailblazing Mary Lou Williams; the swamp-boogie queen Katie Webster; Toshiko Akiyoshi, who cross-pollinated traditional Japanese music with bebop; and many others—is long and continues to grow, even if the general public, and most musicians, haven’t committed its entries to memory.

  And of course, there are also female blues guitar heroes, from the great, bold gospel queen Si
ster Rosetta Tharpe, who matched sacred lyrics with secular rhythms, to, more recently, Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block, Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley, and the much-heralded young, Austin, Texas-based guitarist Eve Monsees.

  Members of the newer generation have shown both a deep respect for tradition and a willingness to remake it to suit their needs. The guitarist and singer/songwriter Deborah Coleman, for example, performs Koko Taylor’s rewrite of Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley’s “Mannish Boy,” renamed “I’m a Woman” and transformed into a declaration of musical and sexual independence. The virtuoso jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson, who has covered Son House and Robert Johnson in her recordings, has increasingly turned to playing acoustic guitar in concert and writing her own songs. And Madeleine Peyroux, an exceptional young jazz-and-blues singer, has taken to infusing her concert performances with folksy blues songs, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar.

  But around the turn of the century from the twentieth to the twenty-first, it was female pianists who were making the biggest commercial impact among blues-based performers. Canadian jazz pianist Diana Krall’s 1999 album, When I Look in Your Eyes, was the first jazz release to be nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy in more than twenty years. Marcia Ball staged a musical breakout in 2003, shooting a segment for NBC’s Today show. And while music critics debate whether Norah Jones is a jazz performer or something more mainstream, it’s clear to anyone who has listened to her music closely that she has the blues in her soul. On her Web site, she has posted a live version of her rendition of “Bessie Smith,” a bluesy, meditative track from Bob Dylan and the Band’s classic album The Basement Tapes. To hear Jones sing that song, her voice sliding down the notes, sliding back into the late 1960s, when the song was first recorded, back into the 1920s when the blues was still young, is to hear the jazz and blues and roots music transmogrified, perhaps not into what they once were, but maybe into what they should or must be.

  “You’ve taken my blues and gone,” Langston Hughes once lamented. Certainly the blues is not what it once was. The days of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, of Son House and Robert Johnson, of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, are long gone. Even the blues pioneers who continue to perform, while still great, and while certainly worth seeing and celebrating, are not the entertainers they were when they were young and vital, and to believe anything else is to fool oneself and to dishonor the past. Even Mick Jagger, the man who learned from the blues masters, who took the music to the next generation of rock listeners, while an entertaining showman, is not the dramatic sexual presence he was in the green of his youth.

  In one sense, of course, the blues can never die. Just as some dinosaurs, instead of becoming extinct, sprouted feathers and evolved into birds, blues—in the form of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton, Nirvana singing a Lead Belly classic and the White Stripes tearing into “Death Letter Blues”—took wing back in the forties, fifties, and sixties. It evolved into folk, electric blues, rock & roll, blues rock, and hip-hop, invigorating and playing a role in the gestation of all the popular music forms that followed.

  The question is, however: Does real blues still exist? While it’s fun to listen to Chris Thomas King meld hip-hop and the blues, and while it may be intriguing and profitable for a techno artist like Moby to sample old blues field recordings and remix them into something modern and danceable, true blues lovers will always want to hear blues that adheres, at least somewhat closely, to the classic contours of the form.

  After all, the blues is a power source, and so people turn to it, as naturally as campers crowd around a fire for warmth. The blues and its related musical forms not only changed the way people heard the world; the blues changed the way the world was visualized, processed, and interpreted. Rockers, rappers, poets, DJs, movie stars, painters, and even computer hackers have all adopted parts of the image. Outlaw-rebel cool, a quintessentially American pose, has its roots in the blues. Mondrian drew from the music in such paintings as his 1942-43 Broadway Boogie Woogie (in his take, New York City streets became jazzy bright blocks of red and yellow and blue), and his philosophy of art was intimately connected with his love of jazz (he wrote an essay on the subject in 1927 titled “Jazz and Neoplastic”). Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, once said that her painter husband would spend days at a time listening nonstop to records by Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong. Said Krasner, “Jazz? He thought it was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.” T.S. Eliot borrowed rhythms from ragtime for the meter of his poem “The Waste Land”; F. Scott Fitzgerald infused The Great Gatsby with the spirit of the Jazz Age; Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston funneled the blues into the written word. When James Baldwin went to Switzerland to start writing Nobody Knows My Name, he took three things with him: a typewriter and two Bessie Smith records. He wrote that it was Bessie, “through her tone and her cadence,” who helped him “remember the things I had heard and seen and felt” in order to find his writing muse.

  Marcia Ball performing at the W.C. Handy Blues Awards, Memphis, 1994

  Listening to the blues helps us remember America—not as it was but as it should be. The cultural critic Albert Murray, in his book The Hero and the Blues, located in the music the country’s most heroic self. “Improvisation is the ultimate human (e.g., heroic) endowment,” he wrote, going on to argue that “the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the hero …” In other words, the blues is always green, it always finds a way to overcome obstacles and adversity and perhaps even obsolescence. Even when the form was new, it was old and embattled; the heroes who created the music, the Bessies and the Billies, all, almost to a person, died poor and out of favor. That’s the blues. It is the music of the outside looking in. To love the blues is to wrap your arms around the outside, to go against prevailing trends. Because the blues is never trendy, loving it is to go against the times. It means romancing something that may never romance you back. That’s love. That’s life. That’s the blues.

  RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

  Lil Hardin Armstrong, Chicago: The Living Legends

  (Original Jazz Classics, 1961). Blues and jazz from an innovator on the keyboard.

  Hazel Scott, Relaxed Piano Moods (Debut Records, 1955, 1985). An elegant, thoughtful recording.

  Marcia Ball, So Many Rivers (Alligator, 2003). Rollicking good tunes from a master entertainer.

  Cassandra Wilson, Blue Skies (Verve, 1988). America’s finest vocalist deconstructs jazz standards.

  Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993).

  Features majestic, groundbreaking covers of Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on My Trail.”

  Norah Jones, Come Away With Me (Blue Note, 2002). An elegant, jazzy album for lovers and those looking for a peaceful, easy feeling.

  Various Artists, Dealin’ With the Devil: Songs of Robert Johnson (Cannonball, 2000). A new generation of blues artists tackles the songs of the master.

  Rory Block, Best Blues and Originals (Rounder, 1987). A solid collection of blues numbers.

  Deborah Coleman, Soul Be It! (Blind Pig, 2002). Hard-driving electric blues performed live.

  Lucinda Williams, World Without Tears (Lost Highway, 2003). A timeless brew of blues, folk, and rock.

  ON LEARNING TO PLAY THE BLUES

  By Otis Spann

  [As told to Paul Oliver, from Conversation with the Blues, 1965]

  One evenin’ my dad said to me, “You wants to be a blues player?” Because he knew how I bin tryin’ to play like Friday Ford. Friday Ford was a great man and a wonderful player, matter-fact I think he was genius. And down to the present time before he died he taught me all I know. I have a real strong feelin’ in my heart for him. He was in Belzoni, Mississippi, and he used to take me and put me across his knee and tell me, he says, “The reason you right here at the piano ‘caus
e I’m tryin’ to make you play.” But I couldn’t because I was too young and my fingers wasn’t develop. After they got develop it were too late because he were dead and gone, but I didn’t forget what he taught me … I had it in my head. So that’s how I picked it up and played it behind him. So my daddy said, “You want to be a blues player? You want to be a blues singer?” I told him, “Yes.” He said,

  “Well, I buy you a piano.” So he bought me a piano and brought it to the house. It was on a Friday, which my mother didn’t know because my mother was a Christian woman, she didn’t like blues. That Sat’dy mornin’ my mother and daddy went to town from the country and that was the only time they’d go to town. Well, I locked the house up—I wanted no one but myself in the house, and I started to playin’ the blues. But my mother forgot her pocketbook and she had to come back and get her pocketbook before she got to town. And when she come back to the house, well she unlocked the door and I was playin’ the blues. She went out and told [my] father, say, “You know what! You know Otis is playing the blues!” My father say, “Well that’s so, he’s playin’ the blues, let him play the blues.” And my father kept me up for three nights playin’ the blues!

  “Blues has been borrowed from and stolen from, and altered and changed over the years in many ways, but when you hear that real thing, it stands out. Everyone can tell what blues is and isn’t. Blues is something that will not go away, no matter how little airplay it gets or how little acknowledgment it gets. It’s the fundamental roots of American music.”—John Hammond